On Sunday, the Trump administration raised the white flag of surrender in its efforts to control the spread of COVID-19.
“We’re not going to control the pandemic,” Mark Meadows, chief of staff to President Donald Trump, admitted on national TV.
Instead, the administration prefers to dwell in Neverland.
“We want normal life to resume,” President Trump said at a rally Sunday. “We just want normal life.”
Unfortunately, wishing is not an effective health policy.
Also on Sunday came the news that the core of Vice President Mike Pence’s staff has tested positive for the coronavirus, including his chief of staff and four top aides.
The outbreak is the second in a month to occur at the White House after President Donald Trump and a half-dozen aides came down with the virus.
Despite Pence’s intimate interactions with those infected — sitting in close quarters on airplanes, conversing without masks, hobnobbing in mass gatherings — the vice president has pledged to maintain his campaign schedule that is taking him from coast to coast.
The message?
I’ll be fine.
Which is the very essence of why the U.S. response to the virus has failed.
In a pandemic, an all-hands-on-deck approach is necessary to help prevent its spread. It’s not about whether a particular individual weathers the virus; but how the nation as a whole fares.
WHAT MEADOWS should have said on Sunday was that once again, we’ve been shown that this virus has no respect for authority and that even the most powerful leaders in the world are susceptible, so people, please, wear a mask, give each other some space, and now with flu season upon us, get a flu shot.
Wishing the pandemic would disappear is no substitute for an effective health policy.
Saying as much is no scare tactic, but a reality check. We are still months out from a vaccine and even longer before it can be made readily available to the public.
So why the charade?
It’s the everything’s-rosy script the president thinks is necessary for his reelection.
“Covid, covid, covid, covid, covid, covid,” he bemoaned Saturday. “That’s all I hear about now,” as if 225,000 deaths from the virus is much to do about nothing. Or that it’s all hoax. “On Nov. 4, you won’t hear about it any more,” he said.
If only that were true.
Instead, over the last 14 days the number of new cases is up 40% for the nation, confirming a third wave of infections.
